Thursday, September 13, 2018

The "dark woman of DNA" goes missing again

There’s a curious incident that took place at the excellent "Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Life" meeting in Dublin last week that I’ve been pondering ever since.

One of the eminent attendees was James Watson, who was, naturally, present at the conference dinner. And one of the movers behind the meeting gave an impromptu (so it seemed) speech that acknowledged Watson’s work with Crick and its connection to Schrödinger’s “aperiodic crystal.” Fair enough.

Then he added that he wanted to recognize also the contribution of the “third man” of DNA, Maurice Wilkins – and who could cavil at that, given Wilkins’ Dublin roots? Wilkins, after all, was another physicist-turned-biologist who credited Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? as an important influence.

I imagined at this stage we might get a nod to the “fourth person” of DNA Rosalind Franklin, whose role was also central but was of course for some years under-recognized. But no. Instead the speaker spoke of how it was when Wilkins showed Watson his X-ray photo of DNA that Watson became convinced crystallography could crack the structure.

You could hear a ripple go around the dining hall. Wilkins’ photo?! Wasn’t it Franklin’s photo – Photo 51 – that provided Watson and Crick with the crucial part of the puzzle?

Well, yes and no. It doesn’t seem too clear who actually took Photo 51, and it seems more likely to have been Franklin’s student Ray Gosling. Neither is it completely clear that this photo was quite so pivotal to Watson and Crick’s success. Neither, indeed, is it really the case that Wilkins did something terribly unethical in showing Watson the photo (which was in any event from the Franklin-Gosling effort), given that it had already been publicly displayed previously. Matthew Cobb examines this part of the story carefully and thoroughly in his book Life’s Greatest Secret (see also here and here).

But nevertheless. Watson’s appalling treatment of Franklin, the controversy about Photo 51, and the sad fact that Franklin died before a Nobel became a possibility, are all so well known that it seemed bizarre, to the point of confrontational, to make no mention of Franklin at all in this context, and right in front of Watson himself to boot.

I figured that the attribution of “the photo” to Wilkins was so peculiar that it could only have another explanation than error or denial. I don’t know the details of the story well enough, but I told myself that the speaker must be referring to some other, earlier occasion when Wilkins had shown Watson more preliminary crystallographic work of his own that persuaded Watson this was an avenue worth pursuing.

And perhaps that is true – I simply don’t know. But if so, to refer to it in this way, when everyone is going to think of the notorious Photo 51 incident, is at best perverse and at worst a deliberate provocation. Even Adam Rutherford, sitting next to me, who knows much more about the story of DNA than I or most other people do, was confused by what he could possibly have meant.

Well, with Franklin’s name still conspicuous by its absence, Watson stood up to take a bow, which prompts me to make a request of scientific meeting and dinner organizers. Please do your attendees the favour of not forcing them to have to decide whether to reluctantly applaud Watson or join the embarrassed cohort of those who feel they can no longer do so in good conscience.